Theodicy Skeleton

by existential Calvinist on 2008年03月09日 09:41 AM

@ Home / Essays / TheodicySkeleton (edit, history)

I say with Leibniz: this is the best of all possible worlds!

I say with everyone else: life sucks!

I’ve been thinking about it lately, and this is what I’ve come up with.

It might be heresy though, so bear with me. Also, please note that throughout, I assume the existence of God, but make no attempt to prove the existence of God. I don’t think the existence of God can be proven. But, I do think that the existence of God cannot be disproved and makes sense. Like how in math, the incompleteness theory and corollaries say that there are in every system true statements that cannot be proven, and any system that can prove itself is contradictory. Similarly, the existence of God is true but cannot be proven since that would render the system contradictory. I know this sounds like a quack, pop-philosophy, crack pot theory. And probably it is. But maybe it’s not, and it all sort of makes sense to me.

OK:

1) The Paradox of Crucifixion:

If (God = Being) + (Christ = God) + (Christ = Dead) → (Being = Dead) → (Being = ~Being)

So, how can Being be Not-Being? Well, it makes sense in a Zen sort of Eastern mysticism way. The idea there is you look at mountains and see mountains. Then you start learning Zen, realize that everything is empty and see no-mountains. Then you reach enlightenment and the mountains return as mountains-in-themselves. This is commonly expressed with the formula A → ~A → A. This makes more sense, when you remember that Christ didn’t stay dead. Christ came back.

So, if Christ died, then for a moment, Being itself slipped into a quantum superposition of Being-and-Not-Being.

Why?

2) The Paradox of Creation:

If God is perfect of Himself, why create life, the universe, and everything?

If God by Himself is maximally perfect, then one would expect that anything He created would be, by definition, less than maximally perfect.

But at the same time, one would expect that since God is perfect, if He created something, it would have to end up being the perfect thing for Him to create.

So, how do those two work together? Well, one, God could just not create. Or two, God could create something that wasn’t perfect, but worked out for perfect in the end.

This is similar to how in quantum physics, it’s OK to violate conservation of matter/energy, etc., as long as you un-violate it within a certain timeframe.

Meanwhile, since God is perfect, but He has two (or more!) perfect choices, unless one is more perfect, He’s stuck like Buridan’s Ass. Unless one thinks of it in a quantum/Zen way, in which case both are equally true and superimposed.

3) The Problem of Forgiveness:

How is God/Christ entitled to forgive the world?

Normally, one cannot forgive something, unless one is personally trespassed against. How then does what we do to torture our fellow man become subject to God’s forgiveness?

Simply put, as with the Paradox of Creation, every time we’re not God, we’re trespassing against God, because we’re his creation, but not perfect. Therefore, since God is personally trespassed against, not only by our sinful actions towards him but also those towards others that disrupt his goal of creating a perfect world and even our sinful action of existing as not-God = not-perfect.

Because of this, God is fully qualified to forgive us. (Or worse, not forgive us and make us not-exist!)

4) The Problem of Evil:

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard the drill:

If [ (God = All Powerful) + (God = All Good ) + (Evil exists) ] → ~God, right?

I would say other monotheisms religions cannot answer this question. The Jewish and Muslim Gods would have been better off not making the world at all. My solution is as follows:

God would be responsible for evil, except that Christ sacrificed Himself. When God made Himself not exist, He was taking the punishment for the sin of the world. Sin would have been a blight on the perfection of the world, except that its existence was mitigated through Christ’s sacrifice. God paid the wages of sin, which are death. God (=Being) let Himself not be, to redeem our sin.

Our being not-perfect implies God’s being a not-perfect creator implies God’s not being. Thus, our being implies God’s death. As Nietzsche said, “God is dead, and we killed Him.”

But, God wouldn’t stay dead, because God’s being dead meant that God had paid the price for sin, which meant that creation was perfect after all, which means that God didn’t have to die.

So (God + Evil World) → Dead God; (Dead God + Evil World) → Good World; (Good World + Dead God) → Live God

Once again, the Zen logic of A → ~A → A.

5) Why Something rather than Nothing?

So, why did God go through all this rigamarole instead just not creating the world?

Because God is Love. And not in the weak sense of the phrase (God is loving), but in the strong sense, God is identical with Love. God is Love, and God so loved the world, that He sent His only begotten Son.

God, for no other reason, Loves the world, and was willing to give Himself up, to realize it.

Why this of all possible worlds? This is just the one He loves. God loved Something more than Nothing, hence Something, though Nothing too was an option. (Collapsing the superposition created in #2.)

6) Why the person of Christ?

So if all this logic stuff implies itself, why did God send Christ as an actual, factual human being?

I’d say God sent Christ, not that He could know suffering but that we could know Him.

On the one hand, in order to properly pay the debt He owed for creating an imperfect world, God did owe it to us to live in His own world and suffer in it and die, as we do. On the other hand, God was doing it for our benefit, not His, since He could have just not created the world at all.

God loved us and wanted us to know, so He told us, even knowing that we would kill Him.

So, even though we were sinners and didn’t deserve to exist, He let us end His existence, in order that we could continue to exist.

After that comes the Gospel, the Evangelion, the Good News. God loves us, and all He wants is for us to love him back. (And we don’t even have to be good at it.)

The person of Christ was, at once, the best way for God to get his message out, and the means by which He could take His logically implied death and rebirth and make it into an actual, existent death and rebirth.

Comment: